Richard Fuller: It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Imran Ahmad Khan), but even more of a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) and my colleague, the hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins). I am now the third of the three Members of Parliament from Bedfordshire to press the case to the Minister for solving the problem that has beset our local force: the conundrum of the national funding formula.
I will, if I may, add to my colleagues’ thanks to the officers of Bedfordshire police for their outstanding service to the community. In our relatively small county, our police not only have to deal with the regular crime that affects many other parts of the country, but have a special responsibility for security in and around our airport at Luton. They have responsibilities for motorway networks that course through Bedfordshire. They have issues of social community cohesion in our urban centres and they have to deal with rural crime as well. For any police force, they would be immense challenges at the best of times, but for Bedfordshire police in these difficult covid times, it has required of our officers an exceptional  level of dedication and service. On behalf of all the Members of Parliament for Bedfordshire, I thank them for their service.
I have listened to some of the contributions to the debate. I have heard some—if I might call it this—knocking copy against certain police and crime commissioners. In Bedfordshire, we do not need to do that. In Bedfordshire, we do not need to do that. We have an outstanding police and crime commissioner in Kathryn Holloway, who has cleaned out some of the problems she inherited, strongly implemented a number of her programmes and created a strong basis for Bedfordshire police. She and Festus Akinbusoye, the candidate for PCC in the elections in May, have clear plans that will deliver a fair amount of effective policing across the whole of Bedfordshire. I will pose a couple of questions to the Minister a little later about some of Festus’s proposals so that we can be confident that, when he is elected, they will be able to be funded and go forward.
On the national funding formula, it is sobering to realise, as my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire said, that this goes all the way back to 2004. Since then, there have been a total of 10 policing Ministers, including the current Minister, and five Prime Ministers, yet the pervasive underfunding of Bedfordshire police persists. I wonder whether my hon. Friend the Minister is that one in 10 who will say, “You know what? I’ve found a solution to it. I’ll find a way of giving Bedfordshire police the funding they deserve.” Seeing as it is nearly 6,000 days that the police officers of Bedfordshire have gone out every day and done their service for the community, it is time that we had a police Minister who says, “Yes, this is a challenge that I will meet and face up to.” I have every confidence that the Minister will respond positively to that.
The success of Bedfordshire police requires a clear strategy, and under Kathryn Holloway we have seen a reallocation of police resources towards dealing with rural crime. That is very important for Bedfordshire, where it is an undue weight on our limited resources. As a number of Members said, we ask our taxpayers to fund our police, and they have an expectation that the police will be there when they need them.
This Government and this Minister have delivered increased numbers of officers into Bedfordshire, and this year have delivered an above national average increase for Bedfordshire police. We are very grateful to the Minister and the Prime Minister for being so clear in their resolve to support our officers by putting funds behind them and more officers into the police force, but there are still some things that we need to do.
I turn to two issues that are of importance locally, and which Festus said are his priorities. They bear listening to by the Minister. The first is community-based policing. To be able to continue the commitment to provide policing across Bedfordshire, we need to be 100% sure—there needs to be a cast-iron guarantee from the Minister—that he will ensure that the Conservative manifesto commitment to increasing police numbers will continue, and that Bedfordshire police will continue to get its fair share, if not more, of the increase in officers. We stood on that manifesto pledge, and I am confident that when the Minister comes to the Dispatch Box he will give us that confirmation.
Secondly, in Festus’s plan there is a renewed focus on drug rehabilitation programmes. I am very interested to hear from the Minister where he sees the priority for drug rehabilitation. I am sure he heard my colleagues talk about how Bedfordshire is the source of quite a lot of the drugs that spread across the country, so this is a very well targeted campaign by Festus. It will help with crime prevention in Bedfordshire and across the country too.
I am very grateful for the Minister’s positive words about the defence of our police officers. I know that he and all Members, whatever their political persuasion, are disgusted at the ways in which some people are using the covid pandemic to put extra pressure on our police by threatening them in despicable ways. I hope the clear message comes from this debate that the force of law will come down very strongly on people who abuse our police in that way.